It’s Thursday. I know the phone won’t ring. We’re in winter drought, dry air sucking moisture from rashy skin and cracked lips. The pond is frozen over, fountain bubbling under a cap of ice. Ducks crowd together on the river-bank, a colony of grey stones, muttering, complaining. I am shrouded in ice, too heavy to float. Cold. Grey. Leaden.

I rearrange the supermarket flowers, extract limp daisies, set survivors into a ceramic pitcher – purple mums in a checkerboard of painted fruit: pears, apples, lemons.

What is the difference between secrecy and privacy? –
I must have privacy to write,
to be the necessary fool. . .

My neighbor, Ann, is dying. She gasps for breath. My friend Evelyn calls from New York: she is no longer able to walk, or travel – her greatest pleasure. “Suffering needs meaning,” she tells me, “and there seems little meaning now.” And April is in the garden: hellebores bowing down their lavender faces, blue stars, bluebells, tiny pale iris – buds on vines and trees – bright skies in the mornings.

May

eating powdered donuts
while hail piles up
in the flowerbeds

spots of sun
in the cloud-dim garden
yellow warblers

On my 55th birthday, the city took down all the trees along the river, in fear that they would fall, and falling, take the dike with them. For days afterward, few birds – only sparrows, no finches, no chickadees. One robin, collecting moss for a new nest.

On Friday, a classmate of Mariah’s died in a car wreck. She was 19. Last week Uncle Russell died of leukemia, of age.